Product Listing Ads

It looks like Google Shopping is trying to beef up their product listings now that a lot of merchants are pulling their feeds because it is no longer free. Until Google transitioned to a commercial model, they had the most comprehensive shopping database because almost every merchant would list their products. Obviously not all merchants can afford to pay Google and have since de-listed their product datafeeds.

This would be a great way for Google to have a more comprehensive database while they try to get more merchants to sign up directly.

Shopping.com sent out a nootice of the partnership today:

Dear Merchant,

We are pleased to announce that Google Shopping recently joined the Shopping.com portfolio of leading publishers. Google recently moved to a commercial-model based on Product Listing Ads and has become a critical channel for retailers. Via our new partnership, you automatically get exposure on this high-performing channel without any extra effort.

This partnership delivers several advantages for you:

Gain efficiency
It’s easy – submit one data feed to Shopping.com and get exposure across a powerful network of high-caliber publishers, including Google Shopping. This allows you to tap into Shopping.com’s rich catalog to deliver highly optimized feeds to Google. You will also have a centralized point of contact who will optimize your performance to achieve optimal ROI.

Benefit from historical relevance
As an early participant in the Google Shopping pilot, merchant offers from Shopping.com gained valuable click history, a key element to boost quality score, which in addition to bid and relevancy, helps Google determine the right offer to serve. This improves the odds that your offer through Shopping.com will be displayed.

Leverage Value Based Pricing
Shopping.com’s sophisticated algorithm automatically adjusts CPCs daily with our Value Based Pricing model to meet ROI goals.
No action is required on your part to gain access to Google Shopping’s customer base. Please contact us if you have any questions regarding this partnership or would like to opt-out.

Google Merchant Center

In your Google Merchant Center feed, you can add the following columns to help with Product Listing Ads.

adwords_grouping

This field is used to group products. It can be used for Product Filters to limit your AdWords campaign to a specific group of products. This field can be useful if you want to bid differently on different subsets of products. It can only hold one value (i.e. “electronics” or “iphone”).

adwords_labels

This field is very similar to adwords_grouping, but it will only only work on the CPC bidding model. It can hold multiple values, allowing a product to be tagged with multiple labels (i.e. “shoes, sneakers”).

adwords_publish

This field is used to exclude select offers from Product Ads. If this field is not included or left blank, all product will be included in your product ads. If you want to exclude any items from being displayed you need to fill the column with a value of “true” or “false”.

adwords_redirect

You can use this field to set the click URL of the Product Listing Ad. This comes in handy when you standard Merchant shopping feed has all the URLs tagged (i.e. ?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CSE). By filling out this field with a plain URL with no tracking (i.e. http://www.merchant.com/product.html), your traffic/revenue will only be attributed to one source.

Google AdWords

Once you add these fields to your feed file, you can filter your campaigns by grouping and labels.

Google has been testing Product Listing Ads for over a year with select *lucky* advertisers. This past week Google has rolled out this feature to all AdWords advertisers. In other words, we are all lucky now.

For some reason, the setup process does not seem very straight-forward. Here is a quick guide on how to set up Product Listing Ads.

Step 1 – Connect Google Merchant Center To Your Campaign

About a year ago, Google released AdWords Product Extensions, where related products are displayed under your ad in a PlusBox. Setting this up is the first step towards getting Product Listing Ads up and running.

You will need to goto the Ad Extesnsions tab in your campaign, and select Product Extensions from the drop down list. Then click on New Extension and check off your Merchant Center account which should show up.

Step 2 – Create Product Targeting On The Ad Group Level

Now that your campaign is connected to your Merchant Center account, you need to select product targeting in the new Auto Targets tab. Click the Add Product Target button and select all products or a subset of your products using the filters. TIP: These product filters look for an exact match only and will give you the ability to validate the results.

Step 3 – Create A Product Listing Ad Type

The next and final step is to create a new Product Listing Ad in the Ads tab of your Ad Group. click the New Ad button and select Product Listing Ad.

You will then be given the option to fill in promo text and save the ad:

That’s all. You’re done… You should start seeing your products displayed on the top right of the Google SERPs for related terms.

For extra credit, you can watch this Google video explaining product ads.